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Bahia  

Aaron Myers

Of all the states in Brazil, Bahia has maintained the strongest ties with Africa and African culture. During the first two centuries of the colonial era, Bahia absorbed most of the slaves imported to Brazil. At this time, the slaves came to constitute a majority of Bahia's population and exerted a proportional effect on the developing character of the state. Today, Bahia's traditions and customs are living testimony to the enormous influence of Africans and their descendants.

Article

Brockden, Magadalene Beulah  

Katherine Faull

was born in the small West African nation of Popo in the first half of the eighteenth century. Beulah was captured by slave traders when she was ten years old. At the time of her birth, Popo was one of the very small African principalities on the so-called Slave Coast of West Africa. The exact route she followed to arrive in North America is still unknown, but she was eventually brought to Philadelphia, where she was purchased by Charles Brockden, the deputy master of the rolls of the Province of Pennsylvania, recorder of the deeds in Philadelphia, and one of the trustees of the First Moravian Church in Philadelphia.

From the time of his purchase of Beulah to tend his ailing wife Susannah née Fox Charles Brockden expressed concern for the enslaved teenager s spiritual well being In her memoir one of the earliest written by an African woman in ...

Article

Casas, Bartholomé de Las  

Trevor Hall

who defended Native American rights and promoted African slavery, only to later condemn it, was born in Seville, Spain. His father, Pedro de Las Casas, had sailed to the Americas as a merchant on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage. He was educated in law at the University of Salamanca. Las Casas is renowned because he recommended that the Spanish king purchase enslaved Africans from Portuguese merchants and ship them from Portuguese colonies in West Africa directly to the Spanish Caribbean. In 1493 Las Casas was living in Seville, where he witnessed the arrival of Columbus following his maiden voyage to the Americas. Columbus brought a number of exotic, colorful tropical birds and a dozen half-naked Native Americans back with him. To fifteenth-century Spaniards, half-naked people were savages. The experience has a profound effect on the young Spaniard.

In 1502 Las Casas boarded an armada that sailed from Spain to Hispaniola ...

Article

Cowles, Jesse  

Brian Neumann

was born into slavery in Albemarle County, Virginia to Montgomery and Sarah Cowles. His owner was probably Presbyterian minister Samuel Wilson Blain, who held at least twelve people in bondage. Blain moved the Cowles family to Williamsburg, Virginia, sometime in the 1850s, and Jesse worked as a farm laborer there. When Union forces marched across the Virginia Peninsula in 1862, Cowles seized the opportunity to escape. He fled to Union lines, leaving his family behind and ultimately making his way to Connecticut.

Cowles enlisted in the Union army at Hartford, Connecticut on 30 November 1863, at the age of eighteen. After spending the winter training, he mustered in as a private in the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry Regiment at New Haven on 8 March 1864 His service records describe him as five feet five and a half inches tall with black hair black eyes and a dark ...

Article

Delaney, Lucy Ann Berry  

Sara Kakazu

autobiographer and religious leader, was born Lucy Ann Berry in St. Louis, Missouri, to Polly Crocket Berry, who was born free in Illinois, but was kidnapped and enslaved as a child. She and her husband, whose name is not known, were enslaved by Major Taylor Berry of St. Louis and had two children, Lucy and Nancy. Delaney's early childhood was relatively happy; she was not aware of her position as a slave nor was she expected to perform any labor for her owners. Lucy Delaney's peaceful childhood was interrupted when Major Berry who had paradoxically been both a master and a friend to her father was killed in a duel After Berry s death his widow remarried and Delaney s father was sold south contrary to the Major s will This traumatic separation only increased Polly Berry s determination to escape with her daughters to freedom she ...

Article

Henry, Thomas W.  

Sholomo B. Levy

minister and blacksmith, was born in Leonardtown, Maryland, the son of Jane and Thomas Henry, slaves of Richard Barnes, the largest slave owner in the district. It is thought that Henry's maternal grandmother, Catherine Hill, had been purchased by the Barnes family on a return trip from England and the Caribbean. Thomas's parents were domestic servants of the Barnes family, which owned tobacco plantations and other business interests. Before his death in 1804, Richard Barnes had stated in his will that his slaves were to be freed; one unusual stipulation he added that suggests a special closeness with these individuals was that the manumitted slaves take the name Barnes.

Thomas, however, did not gain his freedom until almost twenty years after his master's death, because John Thomson Mason a nephew of Richard Barnes and the executor of his estate exploited a growing number of ...

Article

Henson, Josiah  

Charles P. Toombs

and prototype for the title character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Josiah Henson was born a slave in Charles County, Maryland, on 15 June 1789. The details of his life are recorded in The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849). As a very young child Henson states that he was largely unaware that his life was in any way remarkable. It was not until the death of his master, Dr. McPherson and the sale of his mother and siblings that the real horrors and anxieties of slave life impressed him After his family is sold he recalls earlier times when his mother was sexually assaulted and his father was mutilated In spite of the cruel treatment his mother received at the hands of so called Christians she taught him ...

Article

Henson, Josiah  

Peter Hudson

Josiah Henson was originally thought to be the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. He was born into slavery in Charles County, Maryland, but showed such loyalty and devotion that his owner, Isaac Riley, granted him exceptional privileges and responsibilities, and allowed him to work as a Methodist Episcopal preacher. Through his meager salary as a preacher, Henson was able to save almost $300, which he hoped would buy his freedom. Riley agreed with Henson on a price of $450, but knowing that Henson was illiterate, Riley changed the contract to $1,000 and then made plans to sell him. Henson learned of these betrayals and fearing forced separation from his family decided to escape to Canada, settling in Dresden, Canada West (Ontario).

Henson became a British patriot while in Canada and led a volunteer brigade against William Lyon Mackenzie and the Americans ...

Article

Jenkins, Sandy  

Pearlie Peters

(birth and death dates unknown), an African root magician who was influential in the pivotal fight between Frederick Douglass and Edward Covey and was a coconspirator with Douglass and other slaves in a subsequent plan to escape slavery. Sandy Jenkins was a slave whose spiritual beliefs were deeply rooted in African folk magic and its power as a weapon of resistance to the brutality and inhumanity of slavery. Jenkins also participated with several other slaves in an 1836 escape plan devised by Douglass. Regarding both folk magic and the planned escape, Douglass demonstrated skepticism with regard to Sandy Jenkins's legitimacy. Although married to a free woman who had a cabin on Pot Pie Neck, which was south of the Covey farm where Douglass was hired out for a year by Thomas Auld, Jenkins himself was a slave. He was owned by William Groome of Easton Maryland who had ...

Article

Johnson, William Isaac  

Brian Neumann

was born into slavery in Albemarle County, Virginia, to unknown parents. His owners were Anderson and Nancy Johnson, who probably moved him and his family to Goochland County in the 1840s. Anderson put him to work before he turned ten years old, forcing him to tend the chickens, sheep, and cows. When he was a teenager, Anderson trained him as a butler and hired him out to a man in Richmond.

Decades later Johnson still vividly remembered the violence of slavery. Speaking to a Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewer in 1937, he described Anderson beating his slaves, placing them in shackles, and selling them into the Deep South if they tried to escape. Johnson, however, also emphasized Black agency and resistance. He recalled his fellow slaves refusing to work, hiding in the woods to avoid being hired out, and forging slave passes to help others escape from bondage.

Anderson ...

Primary Source

The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery (1847)  

Born a slave in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Leonard Black (1822–1883) is known for writing a memoir of his twenty years of servitude. In overtly religious language, Black describes his treatment under several cruel masters, and his eventual escape to Boston. “I was so ignorant,” Black writes, “…I scarcely knew there was such a place.” By the time The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black was published in 1847 the author was an ordained Baptist minister Thus the central message of his book reproduced below is that his Christian faith compelled him to escape and to work for the eventual abolition of slavery Black made good on that promise later in life when he served in the 25th New York Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War Though his narrative is not well known Black s work as a preacher was as evidenced by the five thousand people in attendance ...

Article

Makandal  

Paulette Poujol-Oriol

Though little is known about Makandal's early life and much of the information about him is shrouded in myth, this famous maroon has become a legendary figure. Most prominent historians do not mention him, but he has become a symbol of Haitian national identity, and all schoolchildren in Haiti learn about his life.

Makandal is said to have come to the French-ruled colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) around 1750. Slave traders had bought him on the coast of Guinea, in Africa, and he was taken to the colony, where he worked as a field hand.

According to accounts of his life, Makandal did not submit to slavery for very long. He soon escaped to the woods, becoming a maroon a fugitive slave Prizes were offered for his capture but he escaped all ambushes It is also said that Makandal was a learned man that he ...

Article

Pritchard, “Gullah” Jack  

Nathaniel Millett

conjurer and slave rebel, was born in East Africa during the final quarter of the eighteenth century. He was a native of the country of “M'Choolay Morcema” (possibly modern Mozambique), from which he was captured, taken to Zanzibar, and sold to Zephaniah Kingsley in 1805. At the time of his enslavement, he possessed a bag of conjuring implements and had been a “priest” in his homeland. Jack may have initially gone to Kingsley's plantation in East Florida but was purchased by the wealthy Charleston shipbuilder, Paul Pritchard, in April 1806 and worked on the docks as a joiner and caulker.

Jack s position as an urban and skilled slave allowed him a number of relative luxuries in a city and society that were dominated by slavery Jack who was single lived by himself off of his master s property and received permission to hire out his time ...